Unitiserve backups.....on the cheap

You can put a backup NAS in any location as long as it's connected to your network. The initial backup is best done wired as it's going to take a while, but the regular incremental backups will be fine with a wireless leg in between, so you can hide that nasty plastic box out of sight in another room.

Sounds a bit complicated,  why not back up straight into a USB HD???    Plug it in > back up > remove. ...... Store it somewhere safe & run a new back up as & when  new albums get loaded.  The first backup will take a bit more than an hour or so,  but incremental's take around 1 minute or less depending on the new material

I use a WD My Passport Ultra 2TB USB-3.  Its about 10cm x 10cm (pocket size) & its formatted & ready to go.   You can find them on www, but they are on £50 promo at the moment from WD

Mike-B My understanding is that you cannot backup via the USB port

Have you successfully backed up a UServe? Or someother device

You answer is very interesting and exactly what I wanted to do.

I am not a UServe user  (sorry)    I have a Synology NAS & I do it exactly as I describe.    But I'm pretty certain it can be done, maybe a UServe owner can advise on the exact set-up path for a USB connection. 

You can't attach a backup to the USB sockets on the US. The only 'official' way to do it is to a NAS, although maybe there's some sort of workaround I'm not aware of to do it to a cheap USB drive. I do put my Unitiserve CD rips onto a Sony Walkman simply by opening the two drives on my computer and dragging the folders I want from one device to the other. Restoring the US from such a drive would be a different matter altogether - I imagine it might work if you had FLAC, not WAV, and restored it to the US downloads folder.

As ChrisSU says, you only need to find a place on your network where you can attach your USB drive (apart from the US itself). In another thread, there is a discussion on putting a USB drive directly onto the router and using it to serve media. This is possible with many modern routers, and what you want to do is even more common. If your router has a USB port, mounting a USB drive there will result in a drive that can be mapped / mounted on your various network devices. You could think of this as a very primitive NAS since it is, in effect, network attached storage.

I'm not a US owner, but I expect that the software you use to create a backup will allow you to specify the destination...your (simple, I hope) task is to locate and point to the USB drive you've attached to your router. It would be functionally equivalent to backing up onto your computer drive or to a USB drive connected there. 

Regards alan

My crossover cable should arrive any day, I will give my madcap idea a try and see what happens! What this space........

If you used a switch to connect your MacBook and your US, and manually assigned static IP addresses in the same subnet to the two devices, you would not need the crossover cable. If the US is capable of joining an ad hoc network and recognized that there was a MacBook at the other end of the wire, you wouldn't need a cross over cable. Will be really interesting to see how your madcap scheme works.

(Would also like to understand why this doesn't "just work", if both your US and your MacBook are already on the same network in your house... I had the impression you could run a desktop nServe application on your Mac to talk to your US and, again an impression, get it to do a backup ... either to the main disc in your Mac or to any mounted drive, including a USB drive attached to your Mac)

Apologies that I have used this much bandwidth on something I clearly don't understand well enough to chime in on!! Good luck!

Regards alan 

The UnitiServe needs to see an empty share on the network, designated by the Desktop Client as a backup. Sounds easy, but can be a real faff in practice...

As Mike suggests, I backed up (well copied actually) about 1300 albums, wirelessly, onto a 2TB USB drive plugged into a MacBookPro, using Finder. It took about 30 hours. 

That sounds good, however for some reason, my macbook refuses to see the US, I might delete the app and reinstall and see if that. Brings it back to life. Then try your method

Thanks!

Deleting DTC and reinstalling won't help. You need to 'permanently mount' the US on the Mac (I do this under System Preferences / Users and Groups / Login items). There are other methods that require a little programming (search online) to ensure that the Mac always logs in to the US at each startup, but the Login option works for me.

Jan

yeah you are spot on I deleted and it made no difference, just about to reboot the mac and see if your suggestion solves my problem

thanks

Jan-Erik Nordoen posted:

The UnitiServe needs to see an empty share on the network, designated by the Desktop Client as a backup. Sounds easy, but can be a real faff in practice...

As Mike suggests, I backed up (well copied actually) about 1300 albums, wirelessly, onto a 2TB USB drive plugged into a MacBookPro, using Finder. It took about 30 hours. 

Is this USB drive your backup for the Unitiserve, and have you tried to restore from it? I've always understood that you couldn't do a proper restore from a USB drive, only from a full-blown NAS. 

still not seeing the US - not sure what happened for ages it worked perfectly - then one day stopped working

i will try the crossover cable 

(In reply to Chris) You could be right. I have restored in the past (with dealer help), from a copy of the MQ folder. I don't know if they did it from a drive or a NAS. The important thing for me was to have a copy of the data. It can be transferred to a NAS later if required.

lescouse posted:

still not seeing the US - not sure what happened for ages it worked perfectly - then one day stopped working

Have you tried setting the US as a Login item ?

Getting the UnitiServe to back up to a nas was the the most challenging thing I've ever had to do in connection with the stereo. No process could be less intuitive, and were it not for the help of Forum members I'd never have succeeded. 

Once all the albums were ripped I sold the damn thing. Using a computer to rip to a nas is so much easier. It's cheaper, more controllable, easier to back up and you can get decent album art, unlike the ropey low definition art that the Serve seems able to find. Oh, and it sounds a lot better too. 

I have previously, with an HDX (which I imagine would show the files & folders in a similar way to the Unitiserve) simply copied the MQ folder on the HDX to a USB attached hard drive.
That was using Finder on my Mac. I'm sure you'd be able to do the same on File Explorer (or whatever it's called) on Windows.
It did however take around 24 hours to copy 1100 FLAC files -  wirelessly.

Hi HH. I am about to go through that process at the moment, trying to back up a unitiserve to a synology NAS. Are there any specific posts you can direct me to that will spare me some of the pain and torment? Many thanks.

We used the help of our local dealer, who even then spent some time on the phone with Naim. As a windows based device (i.e mostly pure shite) the UnitiServe is a particularly nasty computer to deal with, albeit one that performs very well musically.

badger1963 posted:

Hi HH. I am about to go through that process at the moment, trying to back up a unitiserve to a synology NAS. Are there any specific posts you can direct me to that will spare me some of the pain and torment? Many thanks.

I strongly recommend that you call Phil Harris at Naim support, who will be able to get you up and running. When I did mine, he emailed me some instructions on how to do this with a Synology NAS. They were based on an old version, but still easy enough to follow. Phil also offered further help, including doing a remote login so that he could do it for me; I didn't need this, but it was good to know that his support was there if I needed it. 

Also, here are a few notes I took at the time, which might be of some use:

"Set up Unitiserve backup on Synology NAS.

Find the IP address of the NAS and type it into a browser.
Open Control Panel > Shared Folder, click on Create. Name the folder (I called mine unitiservebackup). Enter a description if you want to.
If you intend to play music from the NAS rather than just use it for backup, create 2 more folders, one for CD rips and one for downloads.
Double click on the folder you’ve created. Select Permissions. Check that guest user has Read/Write access.
Go to Control Panel > User and ensure that Guest status has not been disabled. Click on Edit to change if necessary.
Go to Control Panel > File Sharing > File Services and if you use Windows, enter NAIM as the workgroup. Ensure that Windows or Mac File Service is enabled, as required.

Then find the IP address of the Unitiserve and type it into a browser to access the Desktop Client.
Go to System > Music Stores > Add New Music Backup.
Go to System > Network Shares > Manage Network Shares. The folder you created on the NAS should be visible. Select it, and click Enable."

Good luck!

Very impressive, and much better than anything I could have posted. 

Many thanks chrissu. Looks very comprehensive. Will give it a go.

Hungryhalibut posted:

Very impressive, and much better than anything I could have posted. 

With a memory like mine, I soon realised I would never remember what I'd done if I ever had to repeat this, so I surprised myself be taking a few notes for future reference. If they help anyone else too, so much the better. 

When I tried to setup my Synology NAS to backup my US, I got totally stuck although I was following instructions from a posting on the Naim FAQ pages.  So I phoned Naim support, Phil came on the phone, I explained where I had got to and he immediately suggested remoting into my PC. He played around for a couple of minutes confirming that the NAS wasn't behaving correctly and then said he would reset up the NAS from scratch. So we hung up the phones and on my PC I watched him reset the NAS to factory settings, then set it up to automatically backup the US and then starting a manual backup.  After about an hour of that, with several more hours to go, we had a brief messaging chat and he signed off leaving the backup to finish, which duly happened later that day. It's been fine since of course and does an automatic incremental backup once a week. So if you do get into difficulty, I also strongly recommend a chat with Phil.

best

David